Slide Scanner

Slide Scanner Advantages and Disadvantages

Even though you may currently rely on a digital camera for your photo needs, you most likely still have hundreds of photos that were taken with a film camera. Unfortunately, digitizing even a moderately size collection can be costly and difficult if you take all of the negatives to a store for processing. On the other hand, when you own your own slide scanner, you can easily convert all of your negatives and slides to a computer file format. They can easily be transferred then to a CD or DVD medium.

Scan Negatives at Your Convenience

No matter how hard you try, there is always at least one envelope of negatives that doesn’t get put in the same place as the others. As a result, if you decide to have all of your negatives processed at once, you may find yourself needing to make an extra effort as you discover new sets. On the other hand, when you purchase slide scanner for home use, you can simply scan in the negatives whenever you please. As an added bonus, if you don’t like certain pictures, you do not need to save them to a file. Typically, when you send films away for processing, the store will create files for every image on the negative.

Continue Using Your Regular Camera to Generate Slides

There is no question that digital cameras have improved in their quality. Unfortunately, there is still nothing like a film-based camera for certain lighting conditions and photography styles. This, in turn, means that there may still be situations where you will want to use your film camera instead of a digital one. Under these circumstances, having slide scanners in your home will enable you to convert images to computer files on an as-needed basis.

Preserving and Archiving Family Memories

If you have been married for a number of years, or have grown children, chances are some of your favorite photos were taken with film cameras. Without a question, if you are working on a genealogy project, you will not want to miss a chance to archive these photos in a digital format. As may be expected, you are also likely to have all kinds of images from your grandparents and great grandparents. Without a question, if you have to send these items away for processing, you may be concerned about them getting lost. Fortunately, when you have slide scanners attached to your computer, you can simply convert the negatives right in your own home.

As an added bonus, if something ever happens to the original negatives, you will always have peace of mind knowing that they are stored away in digital files. No matter how you look at it, once your images are converted to a computerized format, you can store them in an endless number of places. For example, if you put them on a flash drive, you can always store drive in a bank security box.

Clarity and Resolution of Images

Many people that own flatbed scanners can tell you that the quality of the scans depends on the scanning element, as well as your ability to fine-tune the driver options. In many cases, slide scanners cannot be adjusted to improve the quality of scans. At the same time, if you purchase a cheap scanner, you may find that the images wind up being grainy or unclear. Even though you can purchase a high quality scanner for your home computer, you may find that you have to do some research in order to uncover the best deal available.

Editing and Cropping Images

Depending on the 35mm slide scanner that you chose, it may not do much more than convert the negatives to digital format. Under those circumstances, you will need to edit each file individually. While you can find a number of programs to achieve this goal, you may prefer simply being able to adjust images before they are converted. That said, if you look at some of the newer 35mm slide scanners, you may just find one that will let you make basic cropping and editing changes before the file is saved to your computer.

Over the last few years, film cameras have become almost as obsolete as cassette tapes. Nevertheless, the precious images held on old negatives still have a high value for people that own them. Without a question, if you have several boxes of negatives, you may want to purchase a slide scanner. At the very least, you will be able to covert your files to digital format and be able to share them just as easily as you would share images taken with your digital camera.

About This Site

Here you can find everything you need to know about slide scanner and slide scanning. We hope that our articles will be useful for you to better learn about slide scanners before you make any purchase elsewhere.

Some ideas given may be of great interest for you to consider starting with a slide scanning service as your own business, too.